I was just wondering what professions visiting animal-men and elves/humans/dwarves have most of the time.
The wiki states this:
Guests will come to relax, and only provide social contacts. They may perform in your inn. After they finish their tasks, diplomats may stay for a while as guests.
Scholars will come to study, which includes reading books and discussing scientific topics with other scholars (including other visitors and your own dwarves), and may write books in your library.
Mercenaries will come to enlist in the military. They will either petition for long-term residency or relax, and when you accept them, they can be added to any squad (note that they cannot be squad leaders) and will follow any order the squad receives. They are attracted by your inn.
Performers, as the name suggests, will come to perform in your inn. They will tell stories, dance, make music, or recite poetry. They do this for fun, and will not ask anything in return. They may petition for long-term residency.
Monster hunters visit inns to hunt monsters within the caverns. Once they are granted long term residency they will occasionally go down into the caverns on their own to hunt. As of 0.42.04 they might be bugged as nobody other than Toady has reported seeing them, but supposedly their requirements for arrival are having opened the caverns. As of 0.44.01, this is fixed.
Slaves will come to relax.
Travelers will come to relax. Some may seek sanctuary at your fort, for example, if you liberated them from a site. They may do this even if you have no locations assigned that allows foreign guests.
Spies Will occasionally visit the fortress from other civilizations (as of 0.44.01). Their function at the moment seems mainly to report back to their Civ about what artifacts you have in your fort. The player can identify spies by looking at their names, roles and equipment. An elf spy for example might arrive at your fort claiming to be called 'Urist McBard' despite being an elf carrying only weapons and armour, with no bard skills what so ever. There is a bug in 0.44.02 that can cause a large amount of spies to turn up at the the players fortress as soon as they embark, and just wander around not doing anything.
Mercenaries, Monster Hunters, Performers, Slaves and Scholars are fine, but... Guests, Travellers, Spies? Those are no professions... how do they look?
It would be really useful to have that info, because I could make fitting creature sprites. Like this:
Frog, Frogman, Baby-Frog, Baby-Frogman, Undead-Frog, Undead-Frogman.
Wartrained Frog, Huntingtrained Frog, Melee-Unit Frogman, Ranged-Unit Frogman, Performer Frogman, Scholar Frogman.
That covers most of them I think.
Edit: And what exactly determines who can be a visitor? What token in the creature file? Intelligent / Can_learn?
There are 166 animal men. If I do melee, ranged, scholar, performer, than that's 664 sprites. I think that's a realistic goal.